Today is my sabbath and there are a number of things I "should" be doing--which by my sabbath rules (e.g., Do not do anything you "have"/"should"/"must" do), means I shouldn't do them. But with a move NEXT week and annual conference this week and boxes everywhere and a handful of things still not packed, I feel like I should do those things. With only 3 more actual working days in Hemet, I also really want to go out and visit "one last time" some of my favorite folks.
To say the least, it has been hard not to work today. I did manage to take a good walk and now I am sorting through emails/chats, categorizing, and deleting a bunch of stuff. It's not a must, so it's *legal* and it does feel nice to be purging some of that extra stuff that just seems to get in the way.
As I filed things, I ran across an email update from my early months, talking about how I was feeling in general about ministry and many of my frustrations and my grief that ministry was not all seminary cracked it up to be (or at least not as utopic).
Part of the email read:
I think I am struggling with two things right now 1) grieving the reality of the church. It definitely is not what I expected ministry to be, in some ways at least, and I am regularly discouraged by people's apathy or resistance to God's continued transformational work, it's like, they are okay with God's action if (and only if) it brings immediate and clear blessings, but change (especially of the emotional and ideological variety) is undesired.
That got me thinking. A few days ago I had posted about moving from a mindset of urgency and immediate change in the beginning to one of greater patience now. So, now, reading through my email from 18 months ago, I wonder if the church was reflecting my mindset of urgency, or if I had been projecting my issues onto them...
I don't have a real answer at this point, as the thought just occurred to be 5 minutes ago, but I did think it was interesting...
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